Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Illustration: Jia Sung. The Hills
When the government announced that Pablo Escobar was in jail, Cassandra jumped up and down screaming and Mamá shook my shoulder. “Chula, do you realize? We can go to the movies! We can go out wherever we want now and we won’t have to fear being blown up!” I couldn’t show any emotion that Mamá could later use as a reason to take me to a psychologist. “We can?”
Cassandra was running down the stairs, then she was cheering outside, her yelling growing dim and loud as she ran up and down the block. I was frozen in place because Mamá was studying me. She was calculating something on my face. I tried to appear as natural as possible, like I was posing for a picture. After a while Mamá cleared her throat and declared she was going to give Petrona a holiday to celebrate Pablo Escobar being in jail. She was going to drive Petrona home. Did I want to come? I said yes, and Mamá said good, she would have forced me anyway. Cassandra stayed behind.
In the car, I sat in the back with Petrona, her backpack and things bunched up in the front passenger seat. We drove toward the mountains that looked orange like desert sand in the distance. Petrona wore tight jeans she had to pull up before she sat and a small black shirt she kept pulling down over her belly button. Her lips were bright red, her eyelids colored blue. I had never seen Petrona in her street clothes before. I rested my head on her shoulder and asked her if she would put blue on my eyelids like she had done with hers, but Mamá said something about germs and how you shouldn’t use other people’s makeup but your own, and that she would buy some for me later if I wanted.
I pulled away from Petrona and rested my chin against the pane of the window, watching the street rush under us in a blur of gray. Then I heard the name Pablo Escobar on the radio. A reporter was saying that on top of there being rumors about Pablo Escobar blackmailing the Assembly so that they would make extradition unconstitutional, there was also a cloud of suspicion on his whereabouts the moment he had turned, is the president? Petrona was blowing a bubble of pink gum.
